Bay Village school board asks district re-examine emergency notification procedures

BAY VILLAGE - School board members are asking the administration to re-examine procedures for contacting parents of school children in the event of an emergency.

School board member Amy Huntley brought up the issue following an Oct. 15 incident in which a man reportedly approached a 10-year-old Bay Village girl getting off a school bus in the afternoon and asked her to get into his van. The girl ran and notified police.

Huntley said she heard from parents who were upset the school district didn’t contact them sooner about the incident. Some parents never received notification from the schools, Huntley said. Other board members echoed her concerns.

Many parents first learned of the incident from media reports or an email sent out by Mayor Deborah Sutherland’s office, Huntley said.

School officials said that building principals sent out emails to parents after receiving a press release from the police department the following day. However, the district encountered complications.

“Our principals have a system, an email list,” Superintendent Clint Keener said. “They sent out the notices, but one of the email lists didn’t work.”

The email system used at Westerly Elementary School didn’t work right and the messages weren’t sent out, Keener said. Last week the district was still looking into what went wrong.

Keener said a separate problem occurred at Normandy Elementary School, where building officials didn’t have an email list for parents. Efforts at notification were delayed until they could obtain an email list from a PTA group.

In addition, some parents throughout the district changed their email addresses and failed to notify school officials, he said.

Huntley expressed her opinion that this was an instance in which the district should have used an automated telephone notification system to call parents. The system would call parents with a prerecorded message.

“There’s a breakdown somewhere in our communications, and I would like that we get a standard method for all buildings to communicate,” Huntley said.

Keener said he was out of the office for training when the incident occurred, which complicated the situation and led to building principals taking over the notification responsibilities. He agreed the telephone system could have been used and said he would work to establish a system so that others in the board office are equipped to make such decisions in his absence.

Huntley also suggested the district examine whether it shouldn’t have begun notifying parents before police put together a press release about the incident.

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